Presentation Secrets: Do What you Never Thought Possible With Your Presentations

STORYTELLING RESOURCES

Storytelling is perhaps the easiest subject to practice. We do a lot of storytelling in our everyday life. We tell stories about our work at home, stories about our home at work, stories about our children, about traffic mishaps, pets—you name it. The problem is that we don't pay much attention to how we do it. The moment we are telling a story we are much more concerned with what to say rather than how to say it—because we never prepare properly. We never try to craft the story unless we need to lie. Who has time? We don't even have time for storytelling in business communications!

As Nancy Duarte said once, we've become a culture of first drafts. We just write things and click Send. We have precious moments in our lives, really unique situations probably good enough for Hollywood, and we just let them go without stopping to turn them into something really worth telling. This is unfortunate, and we can improve our ability to turn moments into stories, thus ultimately improving our presentation skills. So, how can you improve your storytelling ability? Consider the following resources.

Books

Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting was the first book about Hollywood scriptwriting I attempted to read but I never managed to finish it. As a matter of fact, going to McKee's live seminar was my solution for not reading this book. I later learned that the book was never meant to be read linearly. Rather, it was conceived ...